British Minister Claims UK Government Policy Has Helped Save the World from 'Climate Change'

A British government minister has come up with possibly the best explanation yet for the planet’s stubborn failure to show any sign of “global warming” since 1998.

Apparently it’s a sign that Britain’s climate policies are working.

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Baroness Verma, a minister at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, was speaking in response to a question tabled by Conservative peer and climate sceptic Viscount Ridley in the House of Lords.

Lord Ridley noted: “The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has confirmed in the same words that there has been a hiatus in global warming for at least the last 15 years.”

He went on to ask Lady Verma: “Would you give us the opinion of your scientific advisers as to when this hiatus is likely to end.”

Lady Verma replied: “It may have slowed down, but that is a good thing. It could well be that some of the measures we are taking today is [sic] helping that to occur.”

Though Amritsar-born Lady Verma opened her first fashion retail business at 19 and has an honorary degree in business administration from the University of Wolverhampton Business School, her expertise in the fields of climate science and energy policy is not generally thought to be unrivalled – or, indeed, existent.

Had she taken advice before making her boast about the success of Britain’s climate policies in arresting global warming, she might have learned the following:

The UK’s total contribution to anthropogenic man-made CO2 levels is less than 1.5 per cent of the world’s total.

Between 1990 and 2013 global CO2 emissions increased by 61 per cent. Of that increase, 67 per cent came from China and Baroness Verma’s country of birth, India. In the same period, the UK decreased its emissions by 19 per cent. (H/T Kevin Marshall at Bishop Hill)

This means that as a result of carpeting the countryside with wind and solar farms, hiking green taxes, driving up fuel bills, helping around 8,000 people each year to die in fuel poverty, slicing and dicing Britain’s avian fauna, further enriching wealthy landowners like the Prime Minister’s father-in-law Sir Reginald Sheffield Bt at the expense of poor energy users, ruining the landscape, risking blackouts and brownouts, and clogging the UK economy with further layers of sclerotic regulation, UK government climate policy has managed to offset nearly 1.2 per cent of the combined CO2 increase of India and China.

It has been said of the government’s new Environment Minister Liz Truss and now it must be said of Baroness Verma too: “Truly, there is no beginning to this woman’s extraordinary talents.”